Reuters
July 28, 2001
U.S. WITHHOLDS BOOK DETAILING '60s INDONESIA ROLE
Washington (Reuters) - The Bush administration has halted the
distribution of a book about U.S. diplomatic and intelligence activities
in Indonesia during the chaotic years of 1965 and 1966, a State
Department official said on Saturday.
The book reportedly states that the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia provided
Indonesian security forces with a list of top leaders of the PKI, the
Communist Party opposition at the time.
The book, a copy of which is available on the Internet, also suggests
the U.S. information contributed to the killing of more than 100,000 PKI
members at the hands of Indonesian security forces.
The flap over the book came the week President Abdurrahman Wahid was
ousted by Indonesia's national assembly and replaced by Megawati
Sukarnoputri, the 54-year-old daughter of Indonesia's founding
president, Sukarno, who was overthrown in the mid-1960s revolt.
Wahid, a frail 60-year-old Muslim cleric who has had two strokes and is
nearly blind, arrived in Baltimore on Friday for a medical checkup.
A copy of the book has been obtained by the National Security Archive, a
nonprofit research institute operated out of George Washington
University in Washington. The institute is a repository for documents
that have been declassified by the government.
The book has been posted on the institute's Web site, www.nsarchive.org.
A State Department official, who asked not to be identified, said the
agency earlier this year ``began the process of arranging'' release of
the book to the public.
He added that the Government Printing Office mistakenly began
distributing copies of the book before an ``internal process'' of review
was completed by the State Department.
The official said he did not know how many copies of the Indonesia
history book had been sold or when the government might resume sales.
According to the National Security Archive, the State Department book
states that on Dec. 2, 1965, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green ``endorsed a
50 million rupiah covert payment to the Kap-Gestapu movement leading the
repression.'' The Dec. 30, 1965 response by the CIA (news - web sites)
to the State Department was withheld, the institute said.
A separate State Department volume covering U.S. activities in Greece,
Cyprus and Turkey in the mid-1960s ``is still locked up in GPO
warehouses,'' the institute said.
The two books are part of a 350-volume series of foreign relations books
published by the State Department.
According to the State Department, the books are intended to present
``the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign
policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.''
Among the volumes released in recent decades were historical records of
the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Arab-Israeli conflicts in the
mid-1960s and Vietnam in 1966.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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